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Book of Koheleth is so little concerned purposely to veil the fiction of the Solomon-discourse, in which he clothes his own peculiar life-experiences, that he rather in diverse ways discovers himself as one and the same person with the Salomo redivivus here presenting himself.
We do not reckon along with these such proverbs as have for their object the mutual relationship between the king and his subjects, Ecc 8:3-5; Ecc 10:4, Ecc 10:16., 20, cf. Ecc 5:8; these do not betray in the speaker one who is an observer of rulers and not a ruler himself; for the two collections of “Proverbs of Solomon” in the Book of Proverbs contain a multitude of proverbs of the king, Pro 16:10, Pro 16:12-15; Pro 19:12; Pro 20:2, Pro 20:8, Pro 20:26, Pro 20:28; Pro 25:2-4., 6f., which, although objectively speaking of the king, may quite well be looked on as old Solomonic-for is there not a whole princely literature regarding princely government, as e.g., Friedrich II's Anti-Machiavel? But in the complaints against unrighteous judgment, Ecc 3:16; Ecc 4:1; Ecc 5:7, one is to be seen who suffers under it, or who is compelled to witness it without the power to change it; they are not appropriate in the mouth of the ruler, who should prevent injustice. It is the author himself who here puts his complaints into the mouth of Solomon; it is he who has to record life-experiences such as Ecc 10:5-7. The time in which he lived was one of public misgovernment and of dynastic oppression, in contrast with which the past shone out in a light so much the rosier, Ecc 7:10, and it threw long dark shadows across his mind when he looked out into the world, and mediately also upon the confessions of his Koheleth. This Koheleth is not the historical Solomon, but an abstraction of the historical; he is not the theocratic king, but the king among the wise men; the actual Solomon could not speak, Ecc 2:18, of the heir to his throne as of “the man that shall be after him,” - and he who has led astray by his wives into idolatry, and thus became an apostate (1Ki 11:4), must have sounded an altogether different note of penitential contrition from that which we read at Ecc 7:26-28. This Solomon who tasted all, and in the midst of his enjoyment maintained the position of a wise man (Ecc 2:9), is described by the author of this book from history and from sayings, just as he needs him, so as to make him an organ of himself; and so little does he think of making the fiction an illusion difficult to be seen through, that he represents Koheleth, Ecc 1:16; Ecc 2:7, Ecc 2:9, as speaking as if he had behind him a long line of kings over the whole of Israel and Judah, while yet not he, but the author of the book, who conceals himself behind Salomo redivivus, could look back on such a series of kings in Jerusalem.